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Sunday, 19 August 2012

My Relaxer Experience

When I was about 15 I decided to get my hair relaxed and below is my experience.

I chose to get my hair relaxed after having a weave for a while and disliking it. Therefore I found the idea of a relaxer very attractive. I googled relaxing and looked at results. It looked amazing and I was very excited to have it. Below are the results I expected.

So I went into the hair dressers with very hight hopes of having my unruly hair transformed into beautiful smooth and shiny hair. As I went into the hairdressers I could smell a disgusting smell of chemicals and burning hair. I sat down and soon after my hairdresser began to prepare the relaxer, as my hairdresser mixed the pink coloured concuction with rubber gloves my nerves grew. How could something that needed to be prepared with rubber gloves be any good for my hair?

She proceeded to aggressively brush and part my hair into four big sections and applied the relaxer. After about 10 minutes my head began to burn uncontrolably, it litteraly felt like my head was on fire. I sat there for another few minutes close to tears as the chemicals burned my scalp and my hair. The relaxer was finally washed out and my hair was straightened and styled. It was very straight at the time but looked horribly greasy as the hairdresser put far too much product on it. Although at this point I was pretty happy with the results. After washing my hair I realised that all that had happened was that my hair was slightly less curly. This is not what I wanted because it meant I still would have to straighten my hair to be happy with it, which meant more damage.

After months and after several touch ups of relaxer this was the final result:

It was horrid, it was dull breaking and just awful. This is when I chose to start my journey to healthy hair. After two years my hair was now a good length although it was still horribly damaged from the relaxer I had had. This meant that I had to chop all my hair off back to the length in the above picture so I could start again and back at square one.

Moral of the story: Only get your hair relaxed if you want your hair to be damaged and dry, or if you want irreversible damage to your hair for two years+